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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Experimenting with @udemy @youtube

Recently I had a look at Udemy who under the slogan of "Who do you want to be" provide on-line courses that are created by professors, lecturers, educators, and trainers. They are available to all, some are free, and most others are quite cheap to sign up for. It has hit the news as they have publicized the things like How 10 Instructors Earned $1.6 Million on Udemy in One Year. They claim that on average, instructors make $10,000 - not bad as an extra line of income. I have viewed some of the (free) material, and they have a huge variety of courses. Definitely good work by the Udemy folks and I think we'll see a lot more of this kind of education. Check out the following video for what Udemy are all about:

I decided to try it out and I created a course on Udemy about Problem-Solving Techniques. I used 37 of my own YouTube videos and structured them into themes (eg decision-making, identifying priorities, etc). Much is modelled on my book - An Introduction to Business Systems Analysis. It is very simple to create a course, and even easier to add YouTube videos. I thought I had a nice course put together and that this time next year I'll be a millionaire! It is not to be as I discovered through their Facebook support that while YouTube videos can be linked or embedded to, it is not allowed to use it for lessons/lectures. I would have to download the video from YouTube and upload it to Udemy. The YouTube links that are allowed should be something like "an example of a news clip from a journalism course".

The thought has struck me - how tough would it be to create a similar site to Udemy that allows courses to be created using YouTube? Would it be useful to not only create your own videos, but to use videos from other content creators (who can be paid with extra Ad revenue)? Might make a nice student project!

Also - why don't YouTube do this? The YouTube EDU section is huge, but it is made up of individual lessons that have to be aggregated together by third parties such as iTunes. Anyone in YouTube/Google reading this should pay attention - there's an opportunity here to improve EDU and make even more money.